



Class 

Book 






(flpgtofl?—. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSJtR 



THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 
OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 

T. R. GLOVER 



THE 

NATURE AND PURPOSE 

OF A 

CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 



BY 
T. It. GLOVER 

FELLOW OF ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, 
UNIVERSITY LECTUBER IN ANCIENT HISTORY 




new ^ar^ YORK 

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






-^ 



COPYRIGHT, 1922, 
BY GEORGB H. DORAN COMPANY 






THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 
OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. I 

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



DEC 20 '22 

C1A692470 



PREFACE 

Probably most prefaces are postscripts, and 
I may say at once that this one is no exception. 
Some who have seen this lecture in proof have 
suggested the question, Why should a Lecture 
given to the Yearly Meeting of the Society of 
Friends lean in this direction? "It is all an 
appeal to the practice of the historic Church, " 
writes one such reader, "whereas* the Quaker 
differentia is, for the most part, an appeal 
against the historic Church, 'the apostasy/ in 
fact, to quote George Fox." I pass by the 
second clause here, and I admit the first, with 
a qualification; I appeal to the experience of 
the historic Church, and, if future headers of 
this lecture wish to know why, I will tell them. 
George Fox, as I understand it, stood with 
the mystics .generally for the possibility of 
immediate contact with God, and of direct 
knowledge of God by God's own communica- 
tion. "I knew Him not, but by Revelation, as 
he, who hath the Key, did open." "I came to 
my knowledge of Eternal Life," wrote "William 
Dewsbury, "not by the letter of scripture, nor 



vi PREFACE 

from hearing men speak of God, but by the 
Inspiration of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, who 
is worthy to open the seals.' ' "God," says 
another, speaking of the early Friends, "has 
opened the Springs of the Great Deep, and 
overflowed their hearts, and they have seen and 
felt beyond demonstration and speech." 1 

Was this true, and what does it imply? John 
Faldo, replying to William Penn, says: "Your 
main fallacies are these two, from an infallible 
Spirit teaching, to the infallibility of the Sub- 
jects, in whom the Spirit dwells as a Teacher; 
And from the Spirit's teaching to its imme- 
diate and peculiar teaching." 2 Everyone who 
studies Mysticism will feel that real dangers 
are indicated here, and it was not left to the 
critics of the early Quakers to remark them. 
St. John of the Cross (1542-1591), a Spanish 
mystic of the Counter Eeformation, has a most 
interesting passage. "I am terrified," he says, 
"by what passes among us in these days. Any- 
one who has barely begun to meditate, if he 
becomes conscious of these words during his 
self -recollection, pronounces them forthwith to 
be the work of God, and, considering them to 
be so, says, 'God has spoken to me/ or, 'I have 

1 These passages and others are grouped by my friend, Dr. 
Rufus M. Jones, in his introduction to Wm. C. Braithwaite's 
Beginnings of Quakerism, pp. xxxv., xxxvi. 

2 Quakerism no Christianity (1673). Part III., p. 20. 



PREFACE vii 

had an answer from God.' But it is not true; 
such an one has only been speaking to himself. 
Besides, the affection and desire for these words 
which men encourage, cause them to reply to 
themselves, and then to imagine that God has 
spoken.' ' 1 

When the modern reader of books reads, in 
George Meredith's poem, " Jump-to-Glory- 
Jane," the opening lines: — 

A revelation came on Jane, 
The widow of a labouring swain ; 

he is apt to feel that this is just the sort of per- 
son to whom a revelation would come — some 
one poor and ill-educated, lacking inhibition 
and nutrition, too, and limited in range of ideas. 
Professor William James wrote that, "from 
the point of view of his nervous constitution, 
Fox was a psychopath or detraque of the deep- 
est dye." 2 Indeed, if Professor Woodbridge 
Kiley's psychological study of Joseph Smith, 
Jun., 3 the Mormon Prophet, is as sound as it is 
interesting, we may find ourselves told before 
long to class the two men together, — each con- 
scious of peculiar inspiration — one hears, the 
other sees, both are honest and both patho- 
logical cases. "Which is absurd.' ' 

1 Quoted by Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism, p. 329. 
3 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 7. 

3 The Founder of Mormonism (published in 1903 by Mr. Heine- 
mann). 



viii PREFACE 

Professor Lake is surely right in his forecast 
that the next great battlefield of the Christian 
Church (or one of them) is to be the subliminal 
consciousness, and he urges that we acquaint 
ourselves beforehand with the facts of psychol- 
ogy and with the facts of religion — adding that 
he means religion and not theology. 1 

What then of the Inner Light? 

Now, I believe that any real light that comes 
to a man from God, directly or indirectly, will 
be confirmed by the light that comes to others 
from Him. God's lights are many; and, if I 
were allowed, I would find a parable of them in 
the lights of a railway station, many and con- 
fusing, if seen at a little distance, yet every one 
of them of value and significance, if a man will 
take the trouble to study them and to use them. 
It is for some such reason that I appeal to the 
experience of the historic Church. I believe in 
George Fox as a religious teacher, and not in 
Joseph Smith, Jun., because I am convinced 
that history is rational and relevant to our- 
selves. In every sphere of life progress has 
been made by use of past experience — in ship- 
building from the earliest dug-out to the 
Olympic and the Mcmretania. In religion also 
the past is never irrelevant; it is a guiding 
series of lights, and it has to be prolonged. 

1 See passage quoted on p. 76. 



PREFACE ix 

To-day no study of origins is considered waste 
of time that is pursued in earnest ; and we may 
fairly claim that to test our own ideas and 
instincts and experiences by those of other 
ages is, at the very least, what we call scien- 
tific; while in the practical conduct of life it 
may save us from false starts innumerable and 
help to set us on some sure path. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

A GENERAL SURVEY OF THE SUBJECT . 17 

CHAPTER 

I THE INHERITANCE WE POSSESS IN THE 
CHRISTIAN CHURCH 21 

The intricacy of its history tends to obscure its 
meaning 

The parable of the leaven an illustration of the 
history of the Church 

The significance of heresy and of the Church's 
confusions 

The Church's unity among all its confusions is 
shown : — 

A. BY THE PERSISTENCE OF THE CHRISTIAN 

TYPE OF CHARACTER 28 

The significance of personality in the story 
of the Church 

B. BY THE PERSISTENCE OF THE GREAT CHRIS- 

TIAN DOCTRINES 34 

This persistence is shown in face of the 
criticism and philosophy of each suc- 
cessive age 

(a) The doctrine of Grace ..... 36 
Christianity "the religion of all poor 
devils " 

(6.) The doctrine of the Incarnation . . 40 
The solidarity of the Church in its 
witness to a faith incredible at first 
xi 



xii CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

sight to the individual with his 
casual preconceptions 
(c) The doctrine of the Last Judgment . 44 

II THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE CHRISTIAN 

SOCIETY 47 

A. THE FIRST DISCIPLES 47 

The Christian Church began in their con- 
sorting with Jesus, in their learning His 
language, and following Him through 
the fluxes and refluxes of His thought 

B. JESUS AS TEACHER 56 

St. Paul's conception of discipleship as 
identification with Jesus in His experi- 
ence 

The repetition of this to-day 

C. JESUS AS MASTER 60 

The plain language of Jesus upon servant 

and Master 
The mission of the Church on the lines of 

the Good Shepherd 

Revelation by obedience 

D. JESUS AS FRIEND 62 

The great doxologies an index to Chris- 
tian experience 
Jesu dulcis memoria 

III THE PLACE AND WORK OF THE 

CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 65 

The value and necessity of association in the 
Christian religion 

The necessity of every Christian society main- 
taining its witness in a progressive knowl- 
edge of Jesus Christ 

A. THE WORSHIP OF THE CHRISTIAN SOCIETY . 68 



CONTENTS xiii 

FAG1 

b. its witness: — 71 

The training of the young 

The guidance of the perplexed 

The preaching of the Gospel, with a sense 

of modern conditions and difficulties 
The conditions of preaching 
Prayer 

C. THE NEED OF THE WORLD 82 

The call of the heathen heart 



THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 
OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 



The difficulties of the doctrine of Inward Guidance are, 
as James Nayler 's experience reminds us, serious and prac- 
tical. I would suggest that the solution lies in a deeper 
interpretation of the person and message of Jesus Christ. 
Apart from the thought of God as we see Him set forth 
in Jesus, and the common consciousness of truth as re- 
vealed in lofty souls who have been touched by His spirit- 
ual fire, it is not evident how the faults of individual 
interpretation are to be corrected. . . . With Jesus as the 
Gospel, witnessed in the conscience of a civilization infected 
by His Spirit, I see the balanee-wheel to the doctrine of the 
Inward Light. 

John Wilhelm Rownteee. 



THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 
OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 

A GENERAL SURVEY OF THE SUBJECT 

The subject before us to-day is the Nature 
and Purpose of a Christian Society. One such 
society will naturally be in all our thoughts, but 
after all there are many. Yet all surely are 
alike in many respects — they have one origin 
and they work for one end. We shall do better, 
perhaps, to look at the matter in a larger way 
and with a wider outlook — to look at the whole 
Christian Church, of which all other Christian 
groups and societies are parts, and endeavour 
to learn something of what it means. 

We have to remember that we are dealing 
with an old story — there is no starting anew 
here. The foundation of every Christian soci- 
ety was laid long ago, and nineteen centuries 
of Christian life are not to be passed lightly by. 
Our great inheritance in the Christian Church 
affects all our thinking and all our action in 

17 



18 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

religious matters. Whatever we do with it, it 
is there. The first part of our study, then, will 
he given to reminiscence. We have to recall 
what the whole Church is and has been in its 
innermost essence, and for what it has stood 
and still stands, and to realise its value for 
ourselves at once as a guide to truth and a 
spiritual reinforcement in action. Its much- 
disputed " authority' ' we shall thus take in its 
proper sense — not as a title to impose belief 
upon us, but as a warrant to us to look for cer- 
tain things with a strong expectation of finding 
them. "I have found reason,' ' wrote Dr. John- 
son, "to pay great regard to the voice of the 
people in cases where knowledge has been 
forced upon them by experience, without long 
deductions or deep researches." Our first task 
will be to try to find what the experience of the 
Christian Church means for us; and we shall 
have to make sure that we reach the heart 
of it. 

In the second place, when once we have begun 
to realise the fact of the Christian Church, our 
task will be to look more closely at its origin. 
We know that it began in a great intimacy and 
under the impulse of a great friendship. We 
shall have to watch the first disciples in their 
intercourse with Jesus of Nazareth, if we are 
to understand, in any real way, why there 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 19 

should be a Christian Church at all. If we find 
that He asked a certain attitude of mind from 
those who first followed Him, we shall take it 
that He asks as much of us ; and if we discover 
something of what He gave to them, and of 
what He was to them, we shall expect that to us 
He will give no less and will be no less. Thus 
we may be better able to take in what is the 
part and place of the individual member of a 
Christian society, as one who is enlisted by 
Christ and who stands in a personal relation to 
Him. 

Lastly we shall have to study the Christian 
Society rather as a community than as a col- 
lection of individuals — to grasp, if we can, how 
essential the common life and activity become, 
at once for our own fullest development and 
for the effective expression of those thoughts 
with which Christ inspires His followers; and 
to understand what is asked of us as members 
of a Christian society, fellow-workers for our 
Master and with Him, and face to face with the 
world's need of Him. 

In all this I shall have to ask your patience 
and your co-operation. If Aristotle, in begin- 
ning his Ethics, warns his reader — or the lis- 
tener to his lectures, whichever it was — that 
he must necessarily treat his subject "in outline 
and not with accurate elaboration' 9 you will 



20 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

understand how much more reason one has for 
such a plea when the scale of treatment is so 
much smaller, and when the theme is the Church 
of Christ. 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 21 



THE INHERITANCE WE POSSESS IN THE 
CHRISTIAN CHURCH 

Whatever we make of it, the Christian 
Church stands out as one of the most signifi- 
cant factors in human society for nineteen cen- 
turies. It has seen civilisation overwhelmed, 
and it has seen it rise again, and been itself the 
centre about which it rose. Every phase of life 
is touched by some relation with the Church. 
All history is full of it. We cannot get away 
from it, however much we renounce it. But 
we are not thinking of renouncing it. We real- 
ise that it means more than we grasp ; but what 
it means — all that it means — it is hard to under- 
stand. 

For the story of the Church is not that of a 
body one and the same from its beginning on- 
ward. It is a story broken, interrupted, rami- 
fied — full of cross threads and unevennesses ; 
there are forward movements and relapses; in 
devotion and piety, even in morality, there are 
records of incredible grandeur and of unintelli- 



22 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

gible failure and dulness. It seems at times as 
if there is no history of the Church — it is a 
series of accidents and false starts — a cam- 
paign without a plan, armies flung here and 
there, out of touch with one another, often cut 
off from their base — confused fighting in which 
the soldiers of Christ seem as often as not to 
spend as much of their ammunition on the 
battalions advancing in parallels with them as 
on the enemy. Greek, Latin, Armenian, Copt, 
Syrian and Abyssinian all have their Catholic 
or Orthodox churches, while, in the West, 
Protestantism, if more energetic, wastes a large 
part of its energy in the complicated tangles of 
its own sub-divisions. When one surveys the 
Church and its history fairly and quietly, what 
does it mean? Or has confusion a meaning? 

We turn back to the Founder of the Church, 
and we get a curious hint that He foresaw more 
or less what its story would be. 

Sometimes He looked back to the fireside at 
Nazareth to find in commonplace incidents 
illustrations of the religious life, and few of the 
parables are so vivid as these. Among the 
parables of the home life that of the leaven is 
one of the shortest and most suggestive. It 
was Mary, we may believe, who put the leaven 
in three measures of meal till the whole was 
leavened, and Jesus sat by the fire and watched 



OP A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 23 

it. In after years the sight came back to Him. 
He remembered the big basin, the heaving, 
panting mass in it, the bubbles struggling out, 
swelling and breaking, and the level rising and 
falling. It came to Him as a picture of the 
Kingdom of Heaven, at work in the individual 
man and in the community. 

There were those who looked for the coming 
of the Kingdom in every bubble of every day, 
but it did not come. But He at least saw deeper, 
and by a simple illustration turned the atten- 
tion of His friends from the bubble to the 
leaven, from the manifestation to the life ; and 
then the manifestation ceased to be a mere 
meaningless bubble breaking in an instant, and 
became a pledge and proof of life, a thing of 
less meaning and of more meaning. It is the 
seething life within the mass that drives up the 
bubbles. They swell and strain; and then be- 
cause the life behind them is too strong for 
them, they break. If it were not there, they 
might have what would be a long and quiet Hf e 
for a bubble. But the breaking shows there is 
life at work behind them. 

Let us keep this parable in mind, and look 
again at the story of the Church. We may 
begin with its names for Jesus. 

The earlier Christians, starting from Jewish 
ideas, called Him Messiah. The name served 



24 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

its day, and expressed for those who used it 
their conception of Jesus as God's Ajiointed, 
who restores all things, who sets all in place, 
and gives their own again to God's own in a 
new and permanent relation with God Himself. 
But for the Greek it was a foreign term and had 
little distinct meaning. It came to be virtually 
a proper name ; and, if the idea of the Messiah 
survived, it was in a new sense, larger, more 
embracing — that is, not quite the old idea. It 
had in a sense broken under the stress of life. 
We can imagine that, by Jewish Christians, the 
quiet supersession of the great conception of 
their race by a Greek philosophical term would 
be realised with pain. What would the Greeks 
make of the Saviour? What did they mean by 
Logos? Or by all the other names and theories 
they flung out with such ease and ingenuity? 
What would be the outcome of all this unchar- 
tered freedom of speculation? Old and new 
ideas were already in conflict — the confusion 
had begun. 

We to-day can see in the long series of the 
early heresies something more than was evident 
to those who first encountered them with pain. 
Each represents some attempt to find the place 
of Jesus in the world, as the world was con- 
ceived by the best thought available. It meant 
that Jesus was now the possession not of a 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 25 

race nor of a sect, but of mankind. He be- 
longed to humanity in earnest. " Under these 
fantastic Terrors of Sect and Schism," as Mil- 
ton wrote of a later day, "we wrong the ear- 
nest and zealous Thirst after Knowledge and 
Understanding which God hath stirred up." 
For, as he says, "Opinion in good Men is but 
Knowledge in the making." Where a leaven 
so powerful came into human thought, the 
working was bound to be tempestuous ; and the 
contribution of heresy to sound Christian 
thinking is not always fully recognised. The 
wrong view calls for its own correction, and 
the half-truth, fatal in itself, may yet be a new 
door opened upon truth. Fresh values were 
found in the familiar Jesus — new vistas of the 
future seen — and once gained they were never 
abandoned. Creed followed creed, each to be 
final ; but men have not quickly reached finality 
in exploring Christ. A fresh pulsation of the 
life that comes from the Spirit of Jesus — and 
the impossible happens. The enormous dis- 
orders that accompanied the Reformation tell 
of the working of the leaven ; and the immense 
lift forward of all humanity that also followed 
is proof positive (for those who will see) 
Whose was the life that stirred in that great 
movement. 

The story of Christ's Church is that of the 



26 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

three measures of meal. Each new bubble 
means some stirring of life, some manifestation 
of a new conquest by the spirit of life within, 
of a new province claimed for the Kingdom of 
God — till the whole be leavened. And for 
every bubble that breaks — creed or ecclesiasti- 
cal system or society — there are those who 
mourn as if the Church itself were dead and 
done for. They are wrong. The life of the 
Church is not going to perish so long as its 
Founder lives and works. If one view after 
another of Jesus Christ and His work forces 
itself upon us, breaking through our old con- 
ceptions, keeping our minds open, our eyes 
and hearts alert and sensitive, and making us 
feel ever more vividly the fulness and variety 
and sufficiency of our Master — can we regret 
it? There is risk, of course. If men start 
thinking, they may think wrongly. If they gain 
some new realisation of Christ, they may lose 
one more vital. Thinking is as dangerous as 
living — as full of perils for individual and 
community ; but the Church stands for life, and 
life takes care of itself wonderfully well. 

i l The Lord has more truth yet to break forth 
out of His holy word. ' * So Robinson of Leyden 
taught the Pilgrim Fathers three hundred 
years ago. The Church is one great society of 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 27 

pilgrims, of many tongues and minds and com- 
munities, and all pilgrims seek a better country 
— -a land of more light, more knowledge and 
more peace. If they straggle and lose their 
ways and cross each other's paths from every 
unexpected point of the compass, none the less 
all are marching in one loyalty. And loyalty 
has a wonderful gift of clearing the air and 
enlightening the eyes. 

The Church Universal with all its confusions 
is our inheritance, and its confusions are a part 
of our inheritance ; and if, instead of rejecting 
the Church because of its confusions, we study 
these, we are likely to find certain aspects of 
order emerge in the midst of the disorder. 
Some things will stand out clearly. For in- 
stance, in every age and land, whatever its con- 
fusions, the great Christian community has had 
the gift of producing a high and great type of 
character; and such a type surely implies an 
unsuspected unity. Again, when we study the 
immense and perplexing variety of opinion that 
has torn the Church into so many parties, it 
emerges that this variety arises from the un- 
even application of certain persistent ideas, 
held firmly, and in measure clearly, to a whole 
phantasmagoria of other opinions which are 
less central and which are held less securely. 



28 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

Finally we shall see that the Church is, in all 
its divisions, at one on the Person and Author- 
ity of its Founder. 

THE CHRISTIAN TYPE OF CHARACTER 

It is quite true that by to-day to speak of the 
" Lives of the Saints " is to suggest to the 
ordinary mind lack-lustre records of anaemic 
and characterless lives, many of them, if not 
wholly legendary, still full of legend, misunder- 
standing and absurdity. There is no doubt a 
certain degree of truth in this prejudice, though 
perhaps not quite enough to absolve us from 
reading those lives which are not open to such 
a charge — an absolution which the Protestant 
Churches too readily grant to themselves. 
Moreover, a certain curious association of peace 
with our ideas of beauty has brought it about 
that, in spite of the conspicuous fact that many 
of the greatest saints have been men of intense 
energy, who did their work in lives of battle 
"not without dust and heat," still to men and 
women of nimble intelligence "saint" seems to 
connote some defect of vitality. This is a pity, 
because it is a beautiful word; but for the 
present we had better let it alone. 

But if, for once, instead of a history of the 
Church, a history of Christian character could 
be written, by some one who combined a wide 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 29 

range of interests and a full-blooded habit of 
mind with the quiet eye for character that 
sympathy gives, and the instinct that knows 
the Spirit of Jesus, the work might be one of 
extraordinary value. Here would appear every 
variety of nature, the strong and the tender, 
the man of action and the poet, the leader and 
the philosopher — all the types singly, and all in 
every conceivable combination — transformed 
and inspired in a new way, progressively and 
collectively moving forward, and advancing 
mankind with them towards the realisation of 
a larger and ampler humanity. And the gist 
of the story would not be some vague abstract 
noun — some theory of evolution ; it would be a 
record of struggle against one influence, ending 
in surrender to it, and of a new life lived in the 
power of another ; and that other would always 
be the same. 

It is quite clear that as a rule to-day the 
Christian Church does not make the use of its 
past that it might. The study of the great 
Christian biographies — and especially the auto- 
biographies — must inevitably bring out the 
strength of the Christian position, and reveal 
resources which we forget. Here are men and 
women very like ourselves — weak and strong, 
stubborn and uncertain, sceptical, timid, and in 
earnest about truth — set face to face to battle 



30 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

with intellectual problems, with moral problems 
and social problems; and many of them begin 
with a misunderstanding or even a rejection of 
the master-thoughts of the Church. They will 
start anew, as we ourselves start anew, without 
reference to the past, to tradition and Chris- 
tian phrase. They will live among facts; and 
then they find a pressure of facts upon them, 
which forces them step by step to realise that 
there is more in the Christian message than 
they supposed. The Church grows in signifi- 
cance for them, as it did for St. Augustine, for 
instance, when he realised the strength and 
happiness of the Christian people in contrast 
with his own disorder and wretchedness, and 
came to feel that there was a power behind the 
Church or within it, which his own life did not 
know. 1 That is the experience of many. 

We do not enough value the fact that the 
story of the Christian religion is the story of 
personality influenced by personality — re-birth 
constantly the product of the influence of the 
re-born. There are cases of people converted 
to Christian belief and conduct without appar- 
ently any personal mediation; this man hears, 
as he puts it, "the voice of all Nature speaking 
to him," or becomes conscious, without any 

1 Confessions viii, 12, 27, The Church, non dissolute hilaris, 
points him to the victories of her children, and asks him why he 
too should not achieve them in Another's strength, as they did. 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 31 

thought of Christ, that a new moral necessity 
is laid upon him; and, without thinking out 
exactly to whom he speaks, he says "If you will 
help me, I will"; another man finds a Bible or a 
tract by accident, and reads it and is changed. 
Even so, we find very often — perhaps always — 
that the former type of case has had a neg- 
lected Christian environment; that is certainly 
true of two instances I have in mind; while 
tract and Bible are conspicuously the work of 
Christian communities. Still, in general, 
Christian conviction is apt to begin in contact 
with Christian character. The blessing comes 
from a higher source, but the broken bread is 
given by human hands. If we study the history 
of the Church aright, we find that behind each 
one of us there reaches a long nexus of person- 
ality, each link in the chain a Christian man or 
woman, till we find ourselves abreast of the 
first disciples in the presence of their Master. 
Indeed, if we reflect how many Christian char- 
acters have contributed their influence to the 
growth and development of the Christian life 
in each one of us, we shall find, if we trace 
what might be called our Christian pedigree, 
that we are connected with Jesus Christ by a 
good many lines of descent, and that these 
cross ancj re-cross amazingly. This great com- 
plex of relations is the Church. 



32 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

Historically and spiritually we are part of it, 
and it belongs to us. The question is, do we 
realise the force and availability of its influ- 
ence? The value of its testimony as evidence 
to truth, when we reflect how that testimony 
has been evolved? The value of its stimulus 
to service and to sacrifice, when we weigh the 
psychology of thfe r martyr in the Roman or the 
Chinese Empire, or of the missionary among 
the Goths or the Bechuanas? We forget that 
to know things means a great deal — that knowl- 
edge depends in great measure on passion and 
intensity. 1 How intensely do we know? 

Do we, as a rule, grasp a tithe of the value of 
such men as Paul, Augustine, Luther, Knox and 
John Wesley — men, all of them, of academic 
habit and intellectual activity — all interested 
intensely in truth and in moral progress, and 
all brought to the position of understanding 
that they cannot help themselves? Each one 
of them is, in a sense, a man who has failed, 
who has made a great surrender ; and each, as 
a result, has entered on a new life, the " given 
life" we might call it, of extraordinary power, 
while he is still growingly conscious of his own 
weakness, "If I perish," wrote Luther to 
Melanchthon, 2 "it will be no loss to the gospel, 

1 Compare the saying of Novalis : "Philosophiren ist dephleg- 
matisiren, vivificiren." 
*26th May, 1521. 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 33 

for you far surpass me. . • • Do not be 
troubled in spirit; but sing the Lord's song in 
the night as we are commanded, and I shall join 
in. . . . The Lord, the universal Shepherd, still 
lives, who will not suffer even a bird to starve ; ' f 
and he dates his letter "in the region of the 
birds who sing beautif ully^ii the trees, praising 
God night and day with all their might.' ' And 
again, in a memorable sentence: "Nos nihil 
sumus; Christus solus est omnia." 1 John 
Knox again writes in 1553, "The pane of my 
heid and stomock trubillis me greitlie; daylie 
I find my brain decay, but the providence of 
God sail not be f rustrat. ' * Every one of these 
men, and they are far from being the only ones, 
would say that his life might be summed up in 
the word that came to Paul: "My grace is 
sufficient for thee, for my strength is perfected 
in weakness." 2 The whole story of Christian 
missions is the same — a long record of men and 
women on whom "necessity is laid;" they have 
been "brought' ' to believe, and they must 
spread the good news that has reached them 
from God in Christ — in weakness, it is true, but 
"out of weakness made strong." 

The great Christian characters who make the 
Church are our inheritance — not as a museum 

1 "We are nothing ; Christ alone is all." 

2 Cf. Augustine Confessions viii, 11, 27, Quid in te at as et non 
etas? Proice te in eum; noli tnetuere: etc. 



34 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

of antiquities or curiosities might be a man's 
embarrassing heirloom, — but as an immense 
fund of spiritual capital. The experience of 
every one of them may be used to interpret our 
own, for in it what in our own is perplexing or 
immature may become intelligible — even Christ 
Himself sometimes only becomes intelligible to 
us in the lives of other men. This is one great 
feature of the Church — one that will secure that 
it at least will never be superseded, or tran- 
scended, so long as spiritual kinship is a real- 
ity in human life. 

THE GREAT CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES 

The next aspect of our inheritance to be con- 
sidered is the persistence of certain great fun- 
damental conceptions. It must be owned at 
once that the central doctrines of the Church do 
not become plausible by being stated in words 
or written down on paper. The Church has 
realised this from the very beginning. "It is 
your philosophy, not your theology, which is 
such a torment to you," wrote Luther to 
Melanchthon * ; and that has been the expe- 
rience of the Church. So long as "the unex- 
amined life is un-live-able for a human being" 
(in Plato's phrase), philosophy will be natural 
to man, and the Church is not exempt from it. 

J 27th June, 1530. 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 35 

But Christian thinkers have failed from time to 
time to distinguish between philosophy and the 
conclusions of philosophers — dogmata, as the 
ancients called them. Like most of us, they 
have always had a lurking suspicion that the 
philosophy of their own day was final, and they 
have endeavoured very often to square Chris- 
tian doctrine with that. Strange results have 
followed — theories that cause us at least the 
utmost perplexity, to imagine how any sane 
person could have held them, Christian or non- 
Christian. But the Church, in the dogged way 
of those who go by instinct, has stoutly held 
by its own beliefs, — beliefs grounded on experi- 
ence and so far verifiable, — whether they 
tallied or did not tally with current thought. 
That this has been so, is of value to us also; 
for we, like many before us, are "tormented by 
our philosophy,' ' and it is something to realise 
that again and again the Church, if it had come 
to terms with the thought of a particular day, 
would have become obsolete in a century or two 
and ceased to be. 1 

Wherever the Church has wandered in 
thought or practice, certain central convictions 
stand out as fixed points. Where they have 
been abandoned, the Church has died away; 

1 For instance, in the case of the Arian controversy — in the 
opinion of historians not all ecclesiastical. 



36 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

where they have been held, it has stood, and 
stood in power against all the forces that mili- 
tate against it, in exact measure with the 
tenacity and faith with which it has held them. 
There has been constant and insistent pressure 
and criticism from without, and as constant an 
inclination from within to compromise. The 
test of an emotion, a faith or a truth is what it 
will survive; and the strength of the central 
convictions of the Church is measured by the 
forces of disruption and decline that they have 
resisted. Here again the experience of the 
Church is an incalculably valuable asset in the 
spiritual life. We are only too liable to-day to 
undervalue it; and yet anyone, who means to 
deal seriously with life, may well lay stress on 
such a mass of records of individuals peculiarly 
gifted with spiritual insight, and on the history 
of the Church as a community; for, like every 
other great community, it is in the long run 
more liable to prove right than any individual 
however gifted. Let us look at these central 
convictions. 

Grace 

First of all we may set the great doctrine of 
Grace — "the greatest of all the Catholic doc- 
trines,' ' Renan said. Many a man will have 
accepted it on the strength of his own spiritual 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 37 

experience enlightened by that of others, before 
he is entirely sure of what else the Church has 
to say. 

It has been said lately that men as a rule do 
not care much about the doctrine of grace until 
they reach the age of thirty. The remark 
would not of course be pressed; but there is 
this element of truth in it, that it is not till we 
begin to get a just measure of our own forces 
and deficiencies, that we care to ask for Divine 
aid. 

"When Duty whispers low, Thou must, 
The youth replies, I can." 

The man in middle age is less ready with the 
answer. "0 wretched man that I am! Who 
shall deliver me?" is more apt to be his 
thought. Grace implies a surrender and a habit 
of acceptance, for which not everybody is ready 
at the same stage. 

It begins with the sense of failure. "Chris- 
tianity is the religion of all poor devils," the 
German Jew Borne said. Conscious of failure, 
conscious too that he can no longer wrestle 
against failure, the unhappy man begins to be 
willing to accept what is given him, whatever 
it be. He leaves off thinking of himself and of 
his sin, his temptations and his weakness, and 
puts himself, with all his failure and limita- 



38 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

tions, into God's hands, to be dealt with as He 
will. Effort, endeavour, every rag of will and 
independence, it seems — the past and all its 
memories and the habits it has bred — the pres- 
ent and all its difficulties — the future too — all 
goes into the hands of God; and God under- 
takes all. A new joy and a new power come 
into life ; and a fresh start is made ; and then 
the old experience repeats itself. For, God 
having forgiven the past, the man starts anew, 
as before, and stumbles, again ; he is trying to 
blend grace with the old life, and it is not to be 
done. Again he betakes himself to self-exami- 
nation, and is dissatisfied with his progress — he 
feels he should have done better. Worry and 
disappointment follow, and more resolve; 
prayer becomes entreaty against sin, and the 
mind is saturated with a sense of its own weak- 
ness; life grows difficult and miserable under 
the thought of failure renewed, and failure 
heightened by ingratitude. Once more the old 
story — till at last it is realised that grace is not 
an affair of a moment in the Christian experi- 
ence, but the whole of it. The debt of gratitude 
will not be paid except by being perpetually 
increased. Grace is to be the unceasing inflow 
of Divine love and power into the surrendered 
life, in such measure that, as Paul puts it, it 
abounds and more than abounds — overflows in- 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 39 

creasingly — the saturation of the heart with 
the Divine love and the constant acceptance of 
the Divine will and the Divine power. Da quod 
iubes et tube quod vis. 1 

"Man so giveth place to God," says the 
writer of the Theologia Germanica, "that God 
Himself is there, and yet the man too, and this 
same unity worketh continually, and doeth and 
leaveth undone without any I, and Me, and 
Mine, and the like; behold there is Christ, and 
nowhere else." 2 "Nothing burneth in hell but 
self-will. Therefore it hath been said 'Put off 
thine own will, and there will be no hell.' " 3 
"So long as there is any self-will, there will 
never be true love, true peace, true rest." 4 
"It is God that worketh in you," wrote Paul, 
"both to will and to do of His good pleasure." 

It all depends, the Church has seen, on 
whether we accept God's promises to forgive 
the past, to redeem the lost opportunity, to 
restore the lost faculties, and Himself to carry 
us through everything, on His own terms. Dif- 
ficulty round about and within, a deepening 
consciousness of weakness and inadequacy, and 
the experience that, with a daily surrender to 
God 's will and a daily acceptance of His power 

1 Augustine, Confessions, X., 29, 40. "Give what Thou dost bid, 
and bid what Thou wilt." 

2 Chapter xxiv. 

8 Chapter xxxiv. 
* Chapter li. 



40 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

flooding life with joy * and peace and helpful- 
ness, all things become possible — these are the 
foundations on which the Church's doctrine of 
grace rests ; and they have been well tested in 
the centuries. 

The Incarnation 

But, in all probability, we shall be told we 
are treating things in the wrong order. Even 
before the doctrine of Grace, there should come 
that of the Incarnation. However it be with 
the personal story of one man and another, the 
Church at least sets this first and history con- 
firms it. "God was in Christ reconciling the 
world to himself" — the Pauline expression 
puts the doctrine in its simplest form. "We 
preach Christ crucified, ' ' he wrote, and he went 
on to explain that he knew men called it fool- 
ishness, and stumbled at it. Men have always 
stumbled at it, and always will, one supposes. 
On this doctrine of the Incarnation no com- 
promise has been found possible by the Church. 
Men may reject it if they will — or if they can; 
they may re-interpret it, explain it, philoso- 
phise it, do what they will with it; but to the 

1 More might be made by Christian people of the value of joy 
a9 an index to truth. Cf. Wordsworth, (Tintern Abbey, 47) : 
"With an eye made quiet by the power 
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, 
We see into the life of things." 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 41 

belief that the Good Shepherd sought the lost 
sheep and brought it back on His shoulder 
rejoicing — that He gave His own life for it, — 
the Church has always held. Incarnation and 
Eedemption in the death of Christ — the two 
doctrines go together. God loved, God came, 
God suffered, God sought, God found — whom 
or what? And the answer of the Church and of 
each individual Christian has always been the 
same — "Me." "Who loved me and gave Him- 
self for me," writes Paul of himself; and else- 
where he says : ' ' Christ also loved the Church 
and gave Himself for it, that He might sanctify 
and cleanse it with the washing of water by the 
word, that He might present it to Himself a 
glorious Church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or 
any such thing; but that it should be holy and 
without blemish. ' ' 

Such a faith is never easy, nor are great be- 
liefs ever easy. An easy faith could never have 
held the Church together. Long ago Tertullian 
pointed out that men did not generally care to 
die for the compromises made between the faith 
of the Church and the philosophies of the 
heathen world. There is even something ludi- 
crous in the idea of a man dying for the cruci- 
fied phantom of the Docetist ; who could die for 
a Jesus who devised a conjuring trick in order 



42 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

to avoid death Himself? It was not think- 
able. 

There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, 
moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise 
a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who 
would wish to die? 

So Jasper Petulengro asks Lavengro. So, 
too, the Church has asked itself over and over 
again, and with a consciousness of a new sweet- 
ness in life. 

Heaven above is softer blue, 

Earth around is sweeter green! 
Something lives in every hue 

Christless eyes have never seen: 
Birds with gladder songs overflow, 

Flowers with deeper beauties shine, 
Since I know, as now I know 

I am His, and He is mine. 

Christians, as an early apologist pointed out, 
are very like other people — the same words, the 
same dress, the same instincts. Whatever 
fanatics did in excitement, the quiet Christian 
people who made the Church have never sought 
martyrdom nor, very much, put themselves in 
the way of it; but they did not put themselves 
out of the way of it. And, when it came to the 
central convictions as to the Redeemer on the 
cross and all that was involved in His death, 
there was no compromise — life might be sweet, 
but it did not matter — nothing mattered, in 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 43 

comparison. "For whom I have suffered the 
loss of all things," wrote Paul. 

Nature, in her false freedom, weeneth she hath forsaken 
all things, yet she will have none of the cross, and saith she 
hath had enough of it already and needeth it no longer, and 
thus she is deceived. For had she ever tasted the cross, 
she would never part with it again. 

So wrote the author of the Theologia Ger- 
manica. 1 

Once more, to men who in every fibre of their 
thinking are individualists — as so many of us 
are apt to be — who will each start anew to think 
the world out, wavering and shifting as to 
truth and the criteria by which it may be judged 
— there is something awful, something wonder- 
ful, in the great spectacle of the Church in its 
solidarity standing one great witness to a 
faith, which the individual, with his short range, 
working on preconceptions imposed on him by 
his day, would pronounce impossible and in- 
credible. It is something to realise that in 
every age men have found it impossible and 
incredible, and have committed themselves to 
a faith that went beyond their understanding 
and been justified. 2 We do not use to the full 
the experience of the Church here. 

1 Chapter li. 

2 In this connection it may be permitted to quote the famous 
and sometimes misunderstood epigram of TertidliaH, De came 
Christi 5: Prorsus credibile est quia ineptum est . . . cortutn est 
quia impossibUe* 



44 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

The Last Judgment 

Lastly, for a moment, we may consider the 
great doctrine of Christ as Master and Christ 
as Judge. The modern reader may be moved 
indeed with the tremendous imagery of the 
Great White Throne and the last Judgment, as 
given in the Apocalypse and in the Hymn of 
Thomas of Celano. It is sublime — but does it 
represent fact? It might be argued that noth- 
ing is sublime that does not answer to deep 
conviction of elemental truth. But we may take 
another path of a less speculative character. 
Committing themselves to this doctrine of 
Christ the Master and Christ the Judge, the 
Christian communities have set before them- 
selves unapproachable standards and inaccessi- 
ble ideals. The reach exceeds the grasp, in 
Browning's phrase ; and it has historically been 
justified. The progress of human morality may 
be popularly explained by evolution; but this 
is to play with phrases. Most of us do not 
know what we mean by evolution. Historically, 
nothing has helped mankind forward so uni- 
formly and so steadily as this concentration 
of the Church's thought on its Master and its 
Judge. Here was motive, here was passion* 
The spectacle of Him who died for the slave 
as much as for the free man, for barbarian 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 45 

as well as for Greek, for woman no less than 
for man, has been a safeguard of the weak, the 
value of which it is hard to calculate. The con- 
stant endeavour in age after age to re- 
embody the character of Christ — an endeavour 
not of individuals but of myriads, ever inspired 
and quickened by the Church's teaching of 
Christ — has been a gain to mankind beyond our 
words. If all the Church taught on this was 
error, it was to the good of mankind ; but error 
has not such a harvest. Eather, whatever the 
errors in the Qhurch's presentment of her faith, 
somewhere in it must be truth, if truth can be 
found at all. 

From the very beginning and ever onwards 
right in the centre of all their thoughts, the 
Christian communities have had Jesus Christ, 
the Son of God, in whom God was, reconciling 
the world unto Himself. He has been the leaven 
within the Church, disruptive, propulsive, re- 
creating and stirring, the permanent life, the 
guarantee and promise of a future that shall 
progressively transcend the past — 

No dead fact stranded on the shore 
Of the oblivious years, 

but the living Christ, always recognised, and 
owned and loved by the Church. The great 
function of the Church has been to witness to 



46 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

Him, and to bring the world face to face with 
Him. Whenever we think of a Christian So- 
ciety, we are driven into the consideration of 
the origin of the Church and of its work. The 
Church came into being through the instinct 
that held together, and bound more and more 
closely together, those men and women for 
whom Christ had meant new life, for whom "to 
live was Christ," and who realised that their 
work in the world could only be done by their 
association with one another in Christ. There 
is no such motive for union as the love of Jesus, 
If we are to make anything at all of the na- 
ture and purpose of a Christian Society, two 
things have to be studied — the individual Chris- 
tian and the common life of the community. A 
community primarily consists of individuals, 
and they come first in the claim for attention, 
though it is also the case that association makes 
certain changes in the individual, which are not 
always to be predicted nor always very easy to 
understand. We may best begin with the in- 
dividual. 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 47 



II 

THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE CHRISTIAN 
SOCIETY 

THE FIRST DISCIPLES 

We do not, as a rule, realise with enough 
clearness how the Church actually began. Yet 
in the Gospels it is stated simply enough. The 
history of the Church, like the history of the 
religious life of every one of us, began with a 
call and a command. 

Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, 
Simon called Peter and Andrew his brother, easting a net 
into the sea, for they were fishers. He saith unto them, 
"Follow Me." 

Over and over again in the Gospels the story 
of a new life begins in this way — or the story 
of a life is ended for every effective purpose. 
There is the man who replies to the call that he 
must "bury his father,' ' to whom the command 
of Jesus comes with a strangely sharp and im- 
perative note: "Let the dead bury their dead, 
but go thou and preach the Kingdom of God." 
Or again, Jesus sees Levi in his customhouse 



48 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

and calls him — "Follow Me," and the man fol- 
lows Him. "Whether early tradition or modern 
criticism is nearer the fact as to the origin 
of the First Gospel, it is significant that the 
early Church picked a man of such antece- 
dents as a likely person to have given a true 
story of Jesus Christ. The instinct was sound; 
it is only such a man or woman — one who will 
rise up and leave all to follow Jesus Christ — 
who will ever give a full and true account of 
Him. On the other hand, there is the rich 
young ruler, of whom we read that Jesus looked 
on him and loved him, and of whom none thp 
less the last we see is his back turned on Jesus 
Christ. He may have lived to grow old and 
respected, full of the conventional decencies 
and dignities of old age, satisfied too that he 
had that day done the right thing — but one 
feels it was the end of the man. When we 
reach the calling of the chosen band, the evan- 
gelist uses a very suggestive phrase. "He 
goeth up into a mountain, and calleth unto Him 
whom He would ; and they came unto Him. And 
He ordained twelve that they should be with 
Him." 

"That they should be with Him" — here lies 
the first definition of the Christian Church. In 
epitome it is the history of Christianity. These 
men were "with Him" — they slipped, some of 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 49 

them perhaps rather reluctantly, into a great 
intimacy. They consorted with Jesus in a life 
of wandering and often of weariness. Such 
stories as that of the Samaritan village give a 
glimpse of what it must have been — a day's 
travel, and this time it was travel in great ten- 
sion of spirit, for His face was "set" for Jeru- 
salem — hospitality refused — a blaze of anger 
and a fierce wish on the part of the disciples, 
— and then the Master's quiet word : " Ye know 
not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the 
Son of Man is not come to destroy men's lives, 
but to save them." The evangelist adds sim- 
ply: "And they went to another village" — an 
ending stripped of every heroic touch, and yet 
wonderfully suggestive to any one who will 
follow them in imagination till he grasps all. 
It is such a life, stripped of all padding, that 
shows the real man. 

They share His life — its triumphs and popu- 
larities, its prospects and hopes, its failures and 
disappointments, the rough and the smooth, as 
life came to Him. They saw Him in every sort 
of situation, at every sort of disadvantage, and 
they came to know Him, they would have said, 
through and through — though afterwards they 
might not have been so sure. They talked with 
Him, one supposes, about every conceivable 
topic, in which men could be interested — 



50 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

Herods and Roman Governors, — zealot tales 
told by Simon, custom house memories of Levi, 
fisher talk of Peter and James and John, neigh- 
bour-talk of home and men and their sons — even 
gossip of Galilean tragedies in Jerusalem and 
accidents of falling towers. What failed to in- 
terest Him? When one looks at the structure 
of the Gospels, one finds how much they rest 
on odd snatches of these many talks and con- 
versations — a word or two of introduction to 
give you the episode or incident — just enough 
to bring out the peculiar relevance of the word 
— and then: "And He said unto them." Inci- 
dent after incident takes us into their relations 
with one another. Even the words He uses for 
His friends — rkta and iraidia — are suggestive. 
How apt He is to use the diminutive in speak- 
ing of people and things He loves, or in speak- 
ing to them! The "little flock' 9 — and as if 
iroifivLov were not enough, Luke adds the ad- 
jective to make it clear — Jairus' "little girl" 
— even the sparrows are represented in Greek 
by a diminutive. It is something to be able 
through His diminutives to steal into the mind 
of Christ. 

For the point which I wish to make is that 
these men not only follow Jesus in His travels 
up hill and down dale, but they follow Him in 
the fluxes and refluxes of His thought, in all 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 51 

His experience, sometimes afar off and some- 
times very near Him. "Ye are they," He says, 
"which have continued with me in my tempta- 
tions" — one of the most striking expressions 
of the New Testament. He has His tempta- 
tions, and somehow or other these men con- 
tribute to Him — perhaps simply by being with 
Him. For it is clear from Mark's record that 
He was often unintelligible to them, and was 
surprised to find that He was so. Yet they 
watch Him in every mind and mood ; and won- 
der, Plato said, is the mother of philosophy. 
They study Him the closer, and come gradually 
nearer to realising the way in which He sees 
and feels. 

They see Him watching Nature, and His 
words impress them, implant themselves in 
their minds and linger — words about flowers, 
and little birds falling out of nests, sheep lost 
or worried, hens and chickens, ploughing, cat- 
tle, and even dogs — "little dogs," the Gospel 
has it. They catch something of His thought 
here. But it is of course the human situations 
that most occupy them — the amazing interest 
Jesus feels in men and women, and in chil- 
dren. "When the children are brought to Jesus 
and are turned away by the disciples, we do 
not always notice that, though the familiar 
hymn speaks of "the stern disciples," the Gos- 



52 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

pel shows that it was Jesus Himself who was 
stern. He was vexed (yyavaicTrjo-ev). It is not 
that He graciously made space and time for 
the mothers and their children; He was an- 
noyed with the disciples; and we are left for 
all time with the matter put straight, and Jesus 
sitting with the children on His lap in the crook 
of His arm ( evayKaXtaafxevos ) . It is worth while 
to remember that this story must come from the 
disciples who had the scolding ; they loyally ac- 
cepted it and came deeper into His mind. 

They watch Him in the great questions of 
right and wrong — how careless He seems of the 
Sabbath, how "angry" with those who are 
shocked at a man being healed on that day ; how 
tolerantly He seems to treat what they count 
the grave sins, and how the sins, that are so 
natural as to be virtually right, set Him on 
fire! What does His tolerance for the vulgar 
sins that bring men to gaols and hospitals mean 
— His tenderness for gross sinners — His impa- 
tience with the hardness of respectable peo- 
ple? They are thrown out of their reckoning, 
and they have to re-think their standards. They 
are following Him in earnest now — through His 
words and thoughts and feelings. From His 
outlook on suffering, from His own share in it, 
they begin to learn a deeper view of it ; though 
even so the Cross is an intense shock to them. 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 53 

Yet here again, in a way, they follow Him, and 
learn of Him, and gain a new outlook into God 's 
ways and methods. And they learn, without 
thinking of it, a new feeling for those who 
suffer. 

Above all, slowly picking their way after His 
footprints, they come to His view of God — per- 
plexed and startled again and again by His new 
instinct for God, His new intelligence of God. 
Everybody of course around them believed in 
some way or other in God ; but here was one for 
whom God was indeed. In the last resort men 
think of God — the last factor in a situation ; for 
Jesus God is the first factor — a splendid ele- 
ment of joy and happiness, the present guar- 
antee of right here and now, the large-natured 
Father. Whenever Jesus speaks of God, they 
seem to see God. Parable after parable, con- 
ceived in an incredible spirit of largeness and 
tenderness and charm, brings home God — God 
who gives and forgives in a great way and wins 
love by it, like the creditor in the story, or the 
prodigal's father, or the good Samaritan. And 
they in turn find their way, prompted by the re- 
peated wonder of the thoughts of Jesus, to this 
central realisation of God. What must it have 
been to hear Him say "Have faith in God," 
and to watch His face as He said it ! 

They divine more or less what this intimacy 



54 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

with God means for Jesus, and form new ideas 
of what prayer may be from what they see it 
is for Him. Their own familiar ways in prayer 
grow old; intercourse with Him leads to the 
consciousness that they need to be taught anew 
to pray. We may say that, in a sense, they 
overhear Him in prayer, and learn His meth- 
ods — the early rising for prayer in the quiet 
place — the ease of His approach — His sense of 
God's readiness to listen. If He taught them 
to pray, it was by example — unconsciously — as 
much as by word. 

Step by step they follow ; and then on a day 
that could not be forgotten, they watched Him 
gaze upon the crowds, scattered like shepherd- 
less sheep worried by dogs. And then, stirred 
in a memorable way, He turned and said with 
feeling: "The harvest truly is plenteous but 
the labourers are few;" and He asked some- 
thing of them: "Pray ye therefore the Lord of 
the harvest that He will send forth labourers 
into His harvest," as if He felt that their 
prayers would help things forward. It was thus 
He taught to pray. It was here too, perhaps, 
that they began to see the meaning and pur- 
pose of the Cross in a love for man, which they 
had not guessed, and which, as they slowly real- 
ised, could find no other expression. 

A span of a few years, or of a few weeks, 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 55 

anci you find a different body of men, not broken 
men, nor disappointed men, but men who have 
followed their Master in thought and feeling to 
the very Cross and beyond, and are now trans- 
formed and inspired with a new love for a vic- 
torious Lord and Saviour, and for His thoughts 
and His methods. They have a sense of being 
His servants and His friends, that carries them 
far. 

All this is ancient history, but it is history 
that repeats itself. Much of the present-day 
hesitation and perplexity as to the Christian 
religion is due to the fact that the old order 
of things is set upside down; that instead of 
our following Jesus Christ through the move- 
ments of His mind, through His experiences, 
His impulses, all His insight and all His feel- 
ing — we, if it may be put so, require Him to 
follow us along the line of our preconceptions. 
But neither new learning nor new discovery 
ever comes so, but by a more humble attitude 
to fact. The preconceptions of most of us are 
not very original ; they are mostly derived from 
common talk and magazines, and progress is 
only possible when we cease to be limited by 
them. 

In any case, for the matter now in hand, we 
have to realise that for a Christian society the 
following of Jesus Christ by each individual 



56 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

is vital. Whatever we make in a speculative 
way of " re-birth, ' ' as a rule it will come after 
rather than before some measure of following 
Christ. To understand the great Christian 
Church, of which every Christian society is at 
once a party and a copy, we have to realise 
Jesus Christ by following Him, in three as- 
pects at least — Jesus as Teacher; Jesus as 
Master; Jesus as Friend and Saviour. 

JESUS AS TEACHER 

First of all, we need clearer ideas of Jesus 
as necessarily our Teacher. "Come unto Me 
all ye that labour and are heavy laden,' ' He 
says; and He adds: "Learn of Me." It is the 
last thing that many of us have thought of do- 
ing. Yet before we are in a position to express 
opinions about Him which can be of the slight- 
est value, we have, like'the first disciples, to 
follow Him a great deal more closely than we 
do. It is a commonplace in art and literature 
and music that great masters and their master- 
pieces impose a discipline upon the critic; he 
must begin by learning from them in frank hu- 
mility, till he can understand them from with- 
in. If Schlegel is to criticise Euripides, 
Goethe said, it should be "upon his knees. ' *■ St. 
Paul here gives us a picture of the true method 
for the disciple — identification with the Mas- 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 57 

ter. Twice over St. Paul speaks of men being 
shaped into the likeness of God's Son. In Ro- 
mans viii. 29, he says that some are predesti- 
nated to be conformed to the image of His Son 
(avfiiJLop&vs rrjs eUovos), and in Philippians iii. 
10 he speaks of the possibility of himself "be- 
ing made conformable unto His death" (ovmjlop- 
<t>ii;dfi6vos tco davaTQ avrov) and knowing "the 
fellowship of His sufferings." Elsewhere 
(Gal. ii. 20) He describes himself as "crucified 
with Christ," and his friends at Colossae (Co I. 
ii. 12) as "buried with Him in baptism, wherein 
also ye are risen with Him." 

St. Paul sets the standard high, but he has 
forecast the story of the Christian Church, for 
the Christian life is the entering, with grow- 
ing passion and intensity, into the experience 
of Jesus Christ, till it is known not by report 
from external sources, but by identification. 
How near has the Church come, or does it come 
— or the special Society of which we may think 
— to the Cross? How deep has it drunk of the 
cup from which He drank? These might be the 
questions of St. Paul, if he discussed our own 
Christian community with us ; or, he might be 
more direct, and ask us these questions as in- 
dividuals : What do we know about it? 

What 'do we know of it all? "Dead with 
Christ"— "living in Christ"— "Christ liveth 



58 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

in me" — which of us would feel easy in using 
Paul's language? Yet this is the learning of 
Christ that has to be achieved by each Chris- 
tian, if the Society is to be effective in Christ's 
sense. It is living "with Him," till we have 
entered into the Passion and come through it 
into the "newness of life," of which Paul 
speaks, and with a face, which, like that of 
Moses in the old story, comes from the great 
initiation shining with a new light. Nor does 
Paul suggest that all is yet done; there is "the 
mind that was in Christ Jesus" to be known 
more and more intensely — "bringing into cap- 
tivity every thought to the obedience of 
Christ." This is St. Paul's conception of our 
work with Jesus Christ as our Teacher. 

All this may seem to lean to the mystical, 
b>ut it has to be supplemented in two ways. 
We have to go to the Gospels and read them 
more intensely and closely than we are used 
to do. We have to know and to watch and to 
grow into intimacy, by following along the his- 
torical path. But there are those, we are told, 
for whom this implies a measure of the his- 
torical imagination of which they are incapable. 
The criticism is not very important, for it is 
surprising how much is realised even by il- 
literate or half -educated readers of the Gospel 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 59 

story. Jesus has always been intelligible to 
simple people. Something too may be expected 
of members of a Christian community in the 
way of intellectual discipline, where the end is 
a deeper realisation of our Master. But there 
is also the school of daily life, where, to any 
one who is even beginning to develop the mind 
that was in Christ, the common occurrences 
and the ordinary people will present themselves 
in a new way, if he is careful, until quite un- 
consciously he comes to think much as his Mas- 
ter would. Finally, in prayer, we have to go 
with our Teacher, as the early disciples did, 
and learn of Him and listen to Him, till our 
prayer becomes a thing of more depth and 
sympathy, of more insight and more faith. 
Prayer is not easy — less easy as one realises 
how much even the slightest prayer implies. 
But, when we study in the school of Jesus 
Christ, we cease to think about impossibilities, 
and do as He did, instinctively; we learn to 
pray somehow; and (here is the experience of 
the Church) God does the rest. 

Again and again it comes with a shock to us 
— how little we know Christ; and yet when 
we think what He has been to those who have 
taken Him seriously and followed Him in 
earnest and known His mind — even when we 



60 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

look back on our own experience and see what 
we ourselves have learnt and unlearnt, — we 
begin to divine what He may be, as we grow 
more willing to obey the call, ' ' Follow Me. ' ' 

JESUS AS MASTEB 

For, after all, obedience is the gist of the 
matter. Jesus Christ is our Master and claims 
our obedience; at any rate the obedience of 
men and women who are members of a Chris- 
tian Society. It is a great deal easier to turn 
the historical imagination on to the Gospel rec- 
ords, to study the origins and growth of the 
Gospel story, and all that scholarship has to 
offer us — a fascinating task, and vastly easier 
than obedience. But in the Gospel story it is 
clearly indicated how Jesus spoke of Master 
and servant. "The disciple is not above his 
Master, nor the servant above his Lord." We 
may find ourselves, He suggests, unprofitable 
servants at best. After the ploughing is done, 
there is still the table to lay and the meal to 
get — still service, still obedience. And more 
than this, there is the great sentence in St. 
John: "As Thou hast sent me into the world, 
I have sent them." The Christian community 
is under the law to Christ; it avowedly and 
deliberately owes Him obedience, and is 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 61 

charged with His errands. Apostleship is 
added service, and it is hard to see how Chris- 
tians can be supposed to be exempt from it — 
as if lower standards of love were asked of us 
than the Master looked for. Nor, after all, is 
it easy to see why a Christian, in any full sense 
of the term, would wish to be exempted, when 
he realises the love of God in Christ. If we 
take the Good Shepherd as the great type of 
Christ, if we remember that we also are among 
those whom He has sought and found ; we may 
find ourselves committed to a more thorough- 
going search for the lost sheep than at first 
we like. But this has to be faced, for it is im- 
plied in Jesus Christ's idea of our relation to 
Himself that our mission to those who need 
Him " in all the world" is not an occasional 
duty but of the essence of the whole 
matter. 

In the next place we have to realise how 
learning of Jesus and following Jesus act and 
re-act on each other. "If any man will do his 
will, he shall know," says the Gospel. "The 
best things I know," said Saint Theresa, "came 
to me not by revelation but by obedience. ' ' We 
shall not get much by revelation without obe- 
dience. That is St. Paul's experience: "I was 
not disobedient to the heavenly vision." And 
it was followed by many more. But we must 



62 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

never forget the cost: "I bear branded in my 
body the stigmata of the Lord Jesus. ' ' * 

We are charged with work for Christ. It 
may be in the daily round and common task, 
it may be outside these — far outside them. For 
if Jesus Christ is to be taken seriously, the sal- 
vation of the heathen is the concern of every 
group in the Church; and if it is the affair of 
the society, the members are not exempt from 
the responsibility. Historically, the call has as 
often reached the Church through the individ- 
ual as the individual through the Church. It 
is disquieting to realise how serious this re- 
sponsibility is and how lightly it is taken. 

JESUS AS FRIEND 

If we speak of Jesus as Teacher and Master, 
the whole testimony of the Church in every age 
of its life must be added, to the reality of Jesus 
as Friend and Saviour. "I have not called 
you servants; I have called you friends " — 
friends of Jesus Christ, with the promise of 
infinite help and friendship. "Come unto me 
all ye that labour and are heavy laden" were 
not the casual words of a stranger. The men 
who heard them knew the speaker; and that 

1 St. Paul's reference is to the practice of branding slaves, 
which in the later and less military days of the Roman Empire, 
had to be extended to conscripts — in each case lest they should 
run away. 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 63 

knowledge gave the words the meaning they 
have always had for Christian people. "All 
men forsook me," wrote Paul, "but the Lord 
stood at my side and put strength into me;" 
and he adds: "and the Lord will deliver me." 
Or look at some of the great doxologies of the 
New Testament, for in men's doxologies we 
often get nearer fact than in their dogma ; they 
are simpler and come more spontaneously from 
the situation : "To Him who is able to keep you 
from falling — ": "To Him who is able to es- 
tablish you : ' ' — 4 ' To Him who is able to do ex- 
ceeding abundantly above all that we ask or 
think." 

The more we study the records of Christian 
experience, particularly the records of 'those 
who are most deeply engaged in difficult and 
dangerous work for the diffusion of the Gospel 
and the reclamation of the lost — the more it 
comes home to us how little we believe in Jesus 
Christ. Here are men and women who have 
ventured all upon the incredible promises of 
help and power and new life — and what they 
have made of life astounds us. On the terms 
which our Lord laid down so clearly of learn- 
ing and obeying, what experience they have 
had of how He keeps, how He uses, how He 
gives a man or a woman the power to heal 
broken lives around them, or, better still, how 



64 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

through them He does it Himself, communi- 
cating Himself and all He brings through them 
in a way that surprises them! "What has He 
been to them in every hour of need! "He is 
our peace.' J 

Jesu, dulcis memoria, 
. Dans vera cordis gaudm, 
Sed super mel et omnia 
Ejus dulcis praesentia. 

Jesu, spes poenitentibus, 
Quam pius es petentibus! 
Quam bonus te quaerentibus ! 
Sed quid invenientibusf * 

1 Readers who prefer Caswall's rendering, "Jesus, the very 
thought of Thee," will forgive the presence of two stanzas of the 
original Latin of St. Bernard. 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 65 



III 

THE PLACE AND WORK OF THE CHRISTIAN 
SOCIETY 

The Christian Society consists, as we have 
seen, of men and women living the new life — 
people born again, in whom Christ is formed, 
as St. Paul puts it. Each has had his or her 
own experience, has made, in gladness or with 
shame, the great surrender and entered upon 
the great obedience and the great intimacy. It 
is an association of those for whom much has 
been done — who draw together in the sheer joy 
that comes from sharing such a Friend. On 
them is laid individually and corporately the 
responsibility for their Saviour's message to 
the present and the future. There is an incal- 
culable element in every form of association 
— the group is a different thing from the sum 
of its constituents, whether lower or higher. 
Here (it has been the belief of every Church 
in every age) the spirit of the whole is given 
as the life is given, and very beautiful have 
been the names given to it — the Earnest, and 



66 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

the Seal, and the Spirit of Jesus. Only, so 
every generation of Christians has believed, in 
this association of those who are redeemed by 
Christ and have made their surrender and ac- 
ceptance, can the full benefit be received, or 
the full effect be given to the inevitable tes- 
timony. The seed will grow wherever there 
is soil, but the wheat has a better chance of 
reaching maturity in the field. Atmosphere 
makes many things possible that seem impos- 
sible. The solidarity of the Christian Church 
throughout the ages, and the unity of its ex- 
perience, in spite of the want of unity in its 
opinions and organisations, tell immensely in 
the experience of the individual Christian. If 
that testimony is to be maintained, if the world 
is to have an effective chance of being brought 
to Christ, the Christian society is essential. 

In the early Celtic Church, we are told, Saint- 
ship became hereditary ; and that Church gave 
place to another of sterner ideals and a richer 
realisation of the Grace of God. And in turn, 
one Church after another yields to the new 
society with a fresh and fuller inspiration and 
a closer touch of Jesus Christ. What else is 
the origin of the Society of Friends? "Then, 
! then," writes George Fox, "I heard a Voice, 
which said, 4 There is one, even Christ Jesus, 
that can speak to thy Condition' : And when I 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 67 

heard it, my Heart did leap for Joy." And 
again: "I saw the great Love of God; and I 
was filled with admiration at the Infiniteness 
of it. And then I saw . . . how by Jesus, the 
Opener of the Door by his Heavenly Key, the 
Entrance was given." "When the older group 
does not actually disappear, it too is apt to 
be driven back upon its origins, and to realise 
anew the glory for which it stands. Is it de- 
sirable that a Church or a Christian society 
should continue except to minister to men the 
glad news of God — of incarnation and redemp- 
tion and grace abounding? A Church with 
such a message the world needs, and for such 
a body men will give their lives. But if it offer 
faint ideals, or in a hesitating voice plead for 
mere possibilities of higher life; if in short it 
has no more to say than the copy books tell us 
— then there is no place for it in an active 
world. It may moulder in a corner aside, or 
wait for fresh revelation — but revelation hardly 
comes that way. It is not to be lightly decided 
that a Church or a man cannot recover the 
first love for Jesus Christ ; and it is always pos- 
sible, with religious societies as with individ- 
uals, that, in a new surrender to God's facts 
and God's will, a new vision will come, and a 
new knowledge of Him who loved the Church 
and gave Himself for it. Men may lose heart 



68 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

and lose faith, and wait (not improperly) in 
their Churches; but to begin the Church life, 
to start their membership of the Church, with a 
great essential doubt at the heart of things, is 
hardly the right way. The Christian society 
is for those who have heard the call of Jesus 
Christ, "Follow Me," and who, in spite of 
doubts and uncertainties, have the central thing 
clear — that, whether possible or impossible, 
they must obey that call, in the faith, explicitly 
realised or unconsciously held, that somehow, 
where such a call is made, it will not be found 
impossible to follow such a Leader. 

WORSHIP 

One of the first purposes for which a Chris- 
tian society exists is Worship. In the New 
Testament, and in books more or less contem- 
porary with it, we have pictures of early Chris- 
tian worship lightly sketched by friendly or 
critical hands. The meetings are diversified 
with sacrament and hymn, preaching and 
prophesying, doxology and prayer. Two or 
three theories of common worship are current 
— that it is essentially ascription of praise and 
thanksgiving to God — that it is communion with 
God whether by means of consecrated elements 
or in silence, mystical or intellectual — that in 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 69 

both of these a vital part is the re-assertion 
of the great faith of the Church, whether in 
set creed or in preaching. The end is edifi- 
cation — to use the f amiliar term of the Author- 
ised Version. Stress will be laid by different 
thinkers in different directions, and each will 
find his warrant in the practice of the Church 
from the beginning, and perhaps in his own 
abstract theories as to what the Church's wor- 
ship ought to be. 

One or two things stand out. When it is real 
worship, common worship may take the indi- 
vidual soul a good deal further than it may 
go alone. We make the atmosphere for one 
another — courage, depression, hope, study, re- 
flection, or whatever it may be ; and faith is, as 
a matter of fact, as liable to be helped or hin- 
dered by environment. Prayer, when it is 
reality, and when it is the common activity in 
one place at one time of a community of like 
experience, may reach a higher plane than we 
have known before, not as a matter of mere 
emotion, but with results that do not pass away. 
Friendship and love are forces that have deep 
spiritual effects that endure; and where they 
come into play in a Christian society, in a 
common experience of Christ and His saving 
power, in a common access to Him, it should 
not be surprising that the life of such a com- 



70 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

nmnity may deeply affect the life of the individ- 
ual and lift it upward into real doxology — that 
Emmaus, as it has been put, may become Em- 
manuel. 

It is our life at Thy feet we throw 

To step with into light and joy; 

Not a power of life but we employ . . . 

Canst thou help us, must we help thee? 

If any two creatures grew into one 

They would do more than the world has done; 

Though each apart were never so weak, 

Ye vainly through the world should seek 

For the knowledge and the might 

Which in such union grew their right. 1 

Life is re-inf orced by this solidarity of the 
Christian communion, for in it Christ becomes 
more real, and things are apt to be seen here 
sub specie aeternitatis in their true proportions. 
Such vision of reality will, over and over again, 
be translated into action and consecration. The 
common worship, if it is the act of all and done 
in deep seriousness, passes out of the formal 
into the effective ; with or without mystical rite 
or element, it becomes communion, and we un- 
derstand in a new and quieter way what the 
early Church meant by its doctrine of the Holy 
Spirit. God's Spirit is not bound by our choos- 
ing, but it is possible for us to become more 
receptive. It is easy to see how men have come 

1 Browning, "Plight of the Duchess." 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 71 

to the view that through the Church the gift 
of the Spirit is mediated. 1 

WITNESS 

This, then, is our first point. Worship is one 
of the great ends of a Christian Society, and, 
when we conceive it so, the transition to the 
next is easy. For, if the Society exists for the 
development of those within it, the develop- 
ment of those outside is not really another 
thing— especially when these may really be 
standing very near. 

Nearest of all, surely, to the members of a 
Christian Society mu^t stand their own chil- 
dren and the children of their fellow-believers. 
The first disciples loyally told the story of the 
scolding they had in the matter of the little chil- 
dren; and, from the very earliest Christian 
times, "I have no greater joy than to hear that 
my children walk in truth" has been the ex- 
perience of all Christian communities. To-day, 
perhaps, there is a relaxation in the sense that 
it is a Christian duty and a joy to teach the 
young the great cardinal principles of the faith. 
They are left to grow up naturally — unguided 
here, while in every other region of life it is 
realised how much the mind needs to be trained. 

1 It is, I think, right to say here that these paragraphs are an 
epitome of my observation and experience of the Student Christian 
Movement. 



72 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

In what art, in what branch of learning, in 
what trade, can the child be trusted to train 
itself? How can we expect the growing child, 

Moving about in worlds not realized, 

to know where best to look for the truth on 
which life depends? The letters of Mr. Glad- 
stone on religious subjects to his children are 
a rebuke to us. He was interested in his chil- 
dren developing the sense for God, and he took 
pains to guide them. 

Mr. Gladstone inculcated on his eldest boy 
the duty of regularity in morning and evening 
prayer and in daily reading of the Bible. — 

"It is good," he writes, "to acquire a habit of reading 
the New Testament for devotion in the Greek when you 
can do it with ease." "Bear about with you upon the eye 
of your mind the image of Christ in whom we live; espe- 
cially of Christ crucified." "Place habit, then, on the side 
of religion. You cannot depend upon your tastes and 
feelings towards Divine things to be uniform : lay hold upon 
an instrument which will carry you over their inequalities, 
and keep you in the honest practice of your spiritual exer- 
cises, when but for this they would have been intermitted." x 

Part of a Christian man's duty — and part of 
a community's — is the guidance of the per- 
plexed. We live in a time when, with every 
kind of emphasis, views, half-views and no- 
views are pressed upon men and women by 

1 D. C. Lathbury, Letters on Church and Religion of W. E. Glad- 
stone, vol. II., pp. 413, 414, 419. 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 73 

earnest propagandists; from the hardest and 
crudest rationalism of the blatant ^common- 
sense" order up to faiths and philosophies, in 
closer touch with the biology and psychology 
of scientific researchers. In the most surpris- 
ing places one comes on people who have been 
laid hold of by splendid half -views, who hail 
them as new revelations, the consummation of 
Christian thinking. Journalism touches every- 
thing to-day, and there is a chaos of thinking 
not unlike that of the early Roman Empire into 
which Jesus sent the men who had learnt of 
Him and followed Him — not, assuredly, to hold 
their tongues and by communion with Him and 
fellowship with one another to develop their 
own souls. "Woe is me if I preach not the 
Gospel!" said St. Paul. We have to realise 
that, if ever the special conditions of an age 
called for clear, thoughtful and brave preach- 
ing of the Person of Christ, and for the kind 
and wise guidance of the young to the centre 
of things, it is our own day. 

We may persuade ourselves that Christian 
character speaks for itself — it does speak ; but 
a Christian character that is inarticulate will 
not speak very clearly. Besides, when all is 
said and done, we are apt to give the epithet 
Christian to much that is merely human and 
natural to man. Christian it is, because Christ 



74 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

absorbs it and gives it a new value and a new 
significance, when the door is opened to Him, 
Sometimes there is even an element of in- 
dolence in our conception of beautiful char- 
acter. But we have to realise that passivity, 
however charming, is not Christian; and that, 
if it speaks, its message will not be the full 
and complete Christ, but a partial Christ at 
best. "The Son of Man is come to seek and to 
save that which was lost." The instinct of 
the early Church went to the parable of the 
Shepherd with the lost sheep upon his shoul- 
ders for its type of Christ. They were right. 
A character or a Church which lacks the im- 
pulse to seek and to save the lost may have 
its beauties of old tradition, or even such holi- 
ness as is associated with quietism, but — "if 
any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is 
none of His." 

The Church has a message and a mission, and 
the world knows it. The world will not listen 
just yet — it is in too great a hurry — but it 
knows very well where to go when it realises 
that the time has come. Men and women, too, 
on whom the currents of modern thought are 
playing, who are not very obviously "the lost," 
look to the Church for guidance. Sometimes 
the Christian Societies will not listen to their 
perplexities, so idle and fantastic do they seem ; 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 75 

but they are real enough to those whom they 
trouble. Not unnaturally much Christian 
preaching has little meaning for people under 
such circumstances; the preachers are too like 
medical men prescribing for diseases they have 
not diagnosed. Without metaphor, there is a 
danger in speaking to people whose language 
and whose thoughts we neither share nor un- 
derstand ; for they at least have the sense that 
our vocabularies differ, and they will cease to 
listen very quickly. How much identification 
did our Lord Himself need with human shame 
and sorrow, before He became intelligible to 
man? If the Church or the Christian Society is 
to speak to any purpose it must be on the terms 
of " being baptised with all experiences ;' ' and 
then men and women will listen to us — they may 
not accept what we urge upon them, but they 
will at any rate move forward to the view that 
the Christian position is one tenable with a real 
experience and knowledge of the intellectual life 
and its difficulties. 

One of the most famous passages in George 
Fox's Journal turns on this very point. "The 
Lord answered, That it was needful, I should 
have a sense of all Conditions; how else should 
I speak to all Conditions? And in this I saw 
the infinite Love of God." Some three pages 
later, in the first folio edition, comes the epi- 



76 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

sode when "the Elements and Stars came over 
me; so that I was in a manner quite clouded 
with it. . • . And as I sate still under it, and let 
it alone, a living Hope arose in me, and a true 
Voice arose in me, which said: There is a living 
God, who made all things. . • . And after some 
time I met with some People, that had such 
a Notion, That there was no God, but that all 
things come by Nature. And I had great Dis- 
pute with them, and overturned them; and 
made some of them Confess, that there was a 
Living God: Then I saw, that it was good, that 
I had gone through that Exercise." 

There are many to-day wrestling with the 
same problem in various forms. In particular 
for some people the whole question of religion 
is taking on a new complexion from the psycho- 
logical studies of our day. Let me quote a 
few lines from a very significant book lately 
published : — 

"Psychology," says Professor Lake, 1 "explainsHhe imme- 
diate cause of the phenomena, [i.e., trance, vision, and 
speaking with tongues, in the early churches of Corinth 
and other places in the first century] ; but what is the 
ultimate cause? That is to say what is religion? To dis- 
cuss this question would be outside the limits of the present 
book, which have perhaps been already passed, but I cannot 
refrain from saying that if I do not mistake the signs of 
the times the really serious controversy of the future will 
be concerned with this point, even among those 'who are 

1 The Earlier Epistles of St. Paul, p. 251. 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 77 

agreed in assigning the highest value to religion, and that 
the opposing propositions will be: (1) that religion is the 
communion of man, in the sphere of the subliminal con- 
sciousness, with some other being higher than himself; 
(2) that it is communion of man with his own subliminal 
consciousness, which he does not recognise as his own, but 
hypostasizes as some one exterior to himself. Those who 
wish to prepare for this controversy will do well to study 
on the one hand the facts of religion 1 — not of theology— 
and on the other the principles of psychology." 

Nor is this the only trouble with which those 
around us have to contend. St. Augustine 
wrestled long with intellectual difficulties, and 
then found that his main problem was a moral 
one, the victory over animalism. 

Now, we, who believe in Jesus Christ, not 
because we deliberately chose to believe, but 
because it became impossible to do anything 
else, believe also that He has sent us, in His 
own words, "as the Father sent Him" — to seek 
and to save men and women, upright, straight 
and honest, from the perplexities and tempta- 
tions that undo the spiritual life. The Church 
has no choice here, unless it resolve to renounce 
its Master and Saviour. The Christian com- 
munity is charged with speech — with speaking 
to all conditions, and with speaking to them 
intelligibly. It implies preparation and conse- 
cration, the dedicated spirit, sensitive to the va- 

1 1 think "the facts of religion" will include that constant 
reproduction of high Christian character to which I have referred ; 
and this at least is not subjective. 



78 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

rieties of personality and situation. How far 
have we identified ourselves with people who (in 
the vulgar phrase) are going to the devil? Can 
we speak to them in a way that will help them — 
waking in them the sense that Christ's people 
are their friends indeed in a world where their 
experience finds friends grow fewer and friend- 
ship colder? How far, again, is the Church or 
the Christian Society a sympathetic atmos- 
phere for people whose difficulties are spiritual 
or intellectual — a place where they are braced 
for forward movement? 

The spoken word is needed; people come to 
us supposing that we have something that 
would help them if they could understand it- 
Can we explain ourselves? Can we make ex- 
perience of Jesus Christ intelligible to people 
to-day? When the Holy Spirit really touches 
a man, he becomes sympathetic and intelligible. 
If we do not bring prepared addresses to our 
meetings, at least we ought to bring prepared 
men, ready for the work of God and knowing 
what it is. We are often astray in our ideas 
of what the Spirit does. Celsus in the second 
century wrote a sarcastic passage about the 
Christian gospel — picturing the Christian God 
as suddenly waking up, rubbing his eyes, and 
sending somebody off with a message. The call 
is not necessarily sudden: to Jeremiah it was 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 79 

said that he was chosen before his birth, and 
the same was said to St. Paul. Ought we to 
wait to be called up as it were by telephone, 
when there is this awful volume of need around 
us ? We may, again, wait so long for the right 
way of doing things, and the right moment, 
that they are never done at all. If we were 
more charged with the Spirit of Jesus, our call 
would be less fitful and occasional ; if we were 
more loyal, we should realise how constant a 
need our Master has of His Church and its 
members, and that He can use them to some 
purpose ; and we should be more available for 
such use, not now and then, but always. 

What makes a great ministry is that a man 
or woman is charged with that sense of the re- 
sponsibility of speaking for God to the needs 
of man, which comes from the love of Jesus; 
for identification with Him is the surest road 
to identification with the sin and sorrow of men. 
The condition of an effective message is that it 
is given under pressure. It may be the pres- 
sure of sin without and within; or it may be 
the pressure of joy in those who inwardly know 
what it is to "feel like singing all the time." 
It will best be the pressure of Jesus Christ. 
How far is He real to us? What does He mean 
to us in example and in force? What do we 
know of Paul's experience of bearing like 



V 



80 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

slaves, branded on our shoulders, the initials 
of Jesus Christ our Owner? Have we heard 
Him say to us also: "Pray ye the Lord of the 
harvest, that he will send forth labourers into 
his harvest"; and have we prayed the prayer 
for which He asks in the spirit in which He 
asked for it? 

We are told, however, that in some quarters 
men and women * l resent preaching. ' ' It is quite 
intelligible, for it is sorry work. "I was with 
you in weakness and in fear, and in much trem- 
bling. And my speech and my preaching was 
not with enticing words of man's wisdom." So 
wrote St. Paul, who knew quite well "the fool- 
ishness of preaching" — knew quite well, too, 
how his words struck Greek and Jew — and was 
sensitive to their contempt — and had to preach 
all the same. Once a man is charged with speak- 
ing in earnest, he can forgive people who have 
not a high opinion of his preaching; he will 
think less and less of it himself. He will recog- 
nise the sheer impotence of the best that he 
can give; and yet the task cannot be shirked. 
More and more he will realise the necessity for 
Another to speak through him. The humiliat- 
ing sense, that we are not the right men for 
God to use, may mean after all that the chan- 
nel is clear at last down which the living water 
can flow. 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 81 

The only resource is prayer; and when that 
prayer comes with the cumulative force of a 
group of people, sympathetic with the great 
mission and knowing by experience in the past 
where prayer and faith can take them, then the 
task becomes more possible. Here is one of the 
great purposes of the Christian society — its in- 
tercession for each and all of its members ac- 
tually committed to the task of speaking for 
God. And it is not a forlorn hope. Our chil- 
dren write us letters — clumsy, awkward efforts 
to convey their hopes as to our being quite well, 
to communicate their small affairs and their 
quaint requests — the characters straggle, the 
lines are uneven, the spellings are precarious, 
and at the end comes the real gist of the thing, 
the postscript of a row of little crosses, the 
signification of which fathers and mothers do 
not need to be told. Our speech, our preach- 
ing, done for Christ ? s sake to further His great 
quest of redemption, seem much like these let- 
ters — shaky and uncertain and empty; but 
Jesus Christ has His own postscripts, and they 
are added. And if we say that they are made 
in the same shape and have the same meaning, 
some people will recognise both shape and 
meaning. We are not left alone in the delivery 
of our message; but if it is given with faith- 
fulness to Him Who gave it, and in a spirit 



82 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

of identification with those to whom it is sent, 
even our efforts may prove, to our own amaze- 
ment, to have been "in demonstration of the 
Spirit and of power. ' ' * 

THE NEED OF THE WOELD 

But, apart from the perplexed and the dis- 
ordered who stand round about us, and who can 
be reached by individuals, there is the need of 
the world. In every so-called Christian coun- 
try we still have the spectacle of society with- 
out Christ ; and in all the rest of the world, in 
addition to that, there is religion without 
Christ. 

"Sad to look upon :" wrote Carlyle, 8 "in the highest stage 
of civilisation, nine tenths of mankind have to struggle in 
the lowest battle of savage or even animal man, the battle 
against Famine. Countries are rich, prosperous in all man- 
ner of increase, beyond example: but the Men of those 
countries are poor, needier than ever of all sustenance out- 
ward and inward; of Belief, of Knowledge, of Money, of 
Food." 

After eighty years it is still the same story. 
We have indeed our records, honourable enough 
to those who did the work, of social progress; 
but it has been a slow business. The redemp- 
tion of London and Birmingham is as hard a 
task as our Lord found that of Capernaum and 

*1 Cor. ii. 4. 

* "Characteristics," Edinburgh Review, No. 108, 1831. 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 83 

Jerusalem. Yet here is one of the purposes of 
the Christian Church, which He loved and for 
which He gave Himself. The burden goes be- 
yond the strength of any single follower of 
Christ; it means the Christian society, shoul- 
dering it in its corporate capacity. The Shep- 
herd with the sheep upon his shoulders may 
give us another suggestion; it is our Lord's 
conception of the attitude of the Church to lost 
humanity. Brave words! easy to speak and 
write! Yet what else is there? 

Nam prcefixa Cruci spes hominum viget. 1 

The world reacts on the Church, chilling 
faith, challenging ideals, dis-spiriting love and 
mocking hope — still more it reacts on the in- 
dividual Christian. There is nothing for it but 
the only way of prayer and humility, and the 
power of God. The Church has faced prob- 
lems before; and the problems of destitution 
will be solved. And the problems of sin, too; 
for here, as in the case of Augustine's intel- 
lectual difficulties, Christians must feel that so- 
cial difficulties will be nearer their end, when 
once it is realised how large a part of them is 
due to moral and spiritual disorder somewhere 
in society, and that, perhaps, not solely in those 

1 Prudentius, Cathemerinon, v., 95. "For Bet upon the Cross, 
the hope of men doth flourish." 



84 THE NATURE AND PURPOSE 

quarters where the bulk of the physical suf- 
fering lies. 

This brings us to the yet larger question of 
the pagan world — of the vast masses of men 
and women and children, "for whom Christ 
died, ' ' for whom His Church does — nothing. If 
anything that has been said in the course of 
this lecture means anything at all, if there is 
any truth in Jesus Christ or any meaning in the 
story of the Church and its witness, if Christ 
belongs to humanity, to the whole of mankind 
of every race, surely the need of the world, 
lying in darkness, must press upon every Chris- 
tian society. If Christ is anything to us, what 
of the regions beyond! Is not this the one 
thing which He asked His disciples to pray 
about? Is it tolerable to think of "Him who 
loved me and gave Himself for me," who also 
loved negro and Chinaman and gave Himself 
for them, and to realise how little we do to 
help Him to find those He seeks? Think of 
the need of the human heart — Tu nos fecisti 
ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donee requi- 
escat in te * — of its restless and broken gran- 
deur, of its crying out for God, "Is it nothing 
to you, ye that pass by?" 

There is a story of a poor Korean woman 

1 Augustine, Confessions, I., 1. "Thou hast made us for Thy- 
self, and our heart is restless until it rest in Thee." 



OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 85 

coming out of a country district to one of the 
towns and asking all she met to guide her to 
A 6 the place where they heal the broken heart. ' ' 
She had heard that it could be done, and in this 
town, too, if she could find the place. And she 
did find it — it was a Baptist mission-station. 
Surely this is a parable of the Church in all the 
centuries — the one body with a promise for 
broken hearts: "Come unto me . . . and I will 
give you rest. " Is it not a call to realise more 
closely the mind that was in Him Who gave 
the promise? 

There let us end for to-day — we have found 
the nature and purpose of a Christian Society, 
and we can sum it up in familiar words: "Go 
ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to 
every creature"; and, if we obey, we in our 
turn shall be able to speak of "the Lord work- 
ing with us, and confirming the word with the 
signs f olio wing/ y 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: April 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



